MacroScope

The U.S. savings rate sank last month to its lowest since November, official data showed this week, in a sour reminder of how the economy is still dangerously exposed to any financial downturn or other shocks like the fiscal cliff. Following are some facts about this usually overlooked indicator:

* The U.S. saving rate is basically the amount of dollars Americans are able to save from their wages after spending and paying taxes, as a percentage of income. In September the rate was at 3.3 percent, a drop from 3.7 percent the previous month and the lowest since 3.2 percent in November 2011.

* The 3.3 percent rate is much worse than the healthy 8.1 percent average of the 1950s and 60s, the Golden Age of the U.S. post-war economy. It is also below the 5.5 percent average of the 1990s.

* A low saving rate means consumers are spending too much in relation to their real earnings, making the economy as a whole precariously reliant on the financial wealth generated by rising stock markets and home values to keep growing at a robust pace and creating jobs.

* This was exactly the situation just before the 2001 slowdown, when the dotcom crash wiped out the financial positive effect that was leveraging growth in an economy where the savings rate had fallen for the first time since the Great Depression below 3 percent, and the recent Great Recession, when it was even lower.

Few mainstream economists have been quite as downbeat on China as Peking University professor and noted China watcher Michael Pettis. Pettis has long held that the world’s No. 2 economy will grow at a maximum of 3.5 percent a year for the rest of the decade, well below a consensus call that appears to have settled into the 5-7 percent range. “And honestly, I think if I’m wrong, it will be to the downside rather than the upside,” he told Reuters.

Lately, though, Pettis says that many people inside China and in some of the countries whose fortunes are tightly tied to its economy are starting to come around to his point of view. At a recent lunch with visiting European Union officials, Pettis said the mood among the attending Chinese economists, academics, think-tankers and policy advisors was universally gloomy. “I’m used to being the most pessimistic guy in the room, but in this case, they were much worse than I.”

Pettis says that’s because the Chinese understand, far better than the average Western investor or economist, just how tough it’s going to be to rebalance from investment to consumption and shift wealth from the state to Chinese households.

Walking past Apple’s sleek shop along London’s Regent Street on Sunday, my wife asked me what I wanted for Father’s Day.

“An iPad?” I ventured, half-jokingly.

“Are you sure you want one? Don’t you care how they’re made?” came her disapproving reply.

She was, of course, referring to the rash of suicides among Chinese workers at Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturer of Apple’s much desired iPads and iPhones.

Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, now has 189 stories in China, according to its website. Soon it will have many more.  The U.S. chain has announced plans to open a series of "compact hypermarkets", using a bare-bones model developed in Latin America, the Financial Times said.

Wal-Mart stores are a bit different than the one's you might find in, say, Little Rock Arkansas. They sell live toads and turtles for one thing, The Economist reported. But they also sell the appliances, gadgets, and housewares that Wal-Mart stores merchandise everywhere.

And business is booming. Third-quarters sales in China soared 15.2 percent from a year earlier, according to the Financial Times story, compared with a paltry 1.4 percent inthe United States.

Far from being lauded as a virtue, China’s high savings rate has been blamed for the economic imbalances underlying the global financial crisis. The criticism being that the Chinese spend too little and rely too much on exporting to Western consumers.

The IMF and World Bank have long called for Beijing to ramp up social spending so its citizens will feel less need to save for a rainy day and instead consume more.

But in their intriguingly named paper,  ‘A Sexually Unbalanced Model of Current Account Imbalances‘, New York-based researchers Du Qingyuan and Wei Shang-Jin suggest China’s gender imbalance could also be a significant factor in the persistence of its high savings rate.

Good session on the "Frugal American," an as yet undiscovered species that is coming to a global economy near you.

You know the general idea, a decade or so of living beyond their means, borrowing money against their rising house values to finance consumption is coming to a grinding halt. That's called a recession, but how long will this frugal thing last?

Ian Davis, the MD from consultants McKinsey & Co was blunt:

"Americans have no option but to be relatively more frugal over the next 10-20 years." This is irrespective of the crisis and is a structural issue due to overspending in the past and the huge host of baby boomers who are now moving into what they fondly hope will be their retirement years. Old people buy fewer ipods and ski boots apparently, and are less likely to remodel their kitchens and bathrooms. That is a problem for the global economy.